Talk about "A Lot Like Love" here:
Review by: Breanne Derby
Plot Summary
Oliver Martin (Ashton Kutcher) and Emily Friehl (Amanda Peet) meet on a plane on a trip from
Los Angeles to New York, and then again on the street in New York, and again in several other places. Over the course of seven years Oliver and Emily see each-other for about a week give or take every two years or so. Their relationship grows and blooms and eventually dies at the end of each brief encounter, and yet they continually see one another. Every few years they reunite to relive the fact that they can never be together. They do this over and over again while in the rest of their lives they do nothing else.
Review
First of all, the casting of this film seems a little strange. Kutcher and Peet don't really have any kind of chemistry on the screen, and though she is only six years his senior in real life, she looks and seems much older throughout the movie. Unfortunately, Peet doesn't do the greatest job acting this part either, leaving the audience not really caring about Emily, and not feeling connected to her at all.
The detachment of the audience from Emily could be due to the fact that there are many time changes throughout the film, and every time a year or two goes by, instead of having her personality grow and mature and evolve, she seems to become a totally different person. In the beginning she is a wild "punk" girl who had her ex-boyfriend's name tattooed on her back after knowing him two weeks, three years later, however, instead of growing up or aging, she becomes a social butterfly who is desperately looking for a date to a new-years bash. Two years after that instead of aging into a gossipy hen she becomes a slightly aged have-no-cares person whom she stays for the next two years. It is these time/personality changes that cause Emily to be an unemotional and distant person. This is not helped by the fact that Amanda Peet can't act.
Personally I like Ashton Kutcher as an actor; he did a great job in The Butterfly Effect, but A Lot Like Love is not up to par. Kutcher's acting was alright, and at the very least his character was consistent, but in general Oliver is very bland and mundane, having nothing to set him apart from anything.
Unfortunately, in addition to Emily's many personalities, A Lot Like Love seems to work in a different world than the real one. In the world A Lot Like Love takes place in, Oliver and Emily are the only two people in existence. They happen to meet in the streets of New York after having flown in from L.A. on the same airplane, despite the fact that that would never happen in real life, and then again in the future Oliver comes across a woman who knows Emily and displays the photographs she takes in L.A. In the real world, Oliver and Emily would have met on the plane, and never seen each-other again, but in the world of A Lot Like Love, the only humans in existence know Oliver or Emily, so finding one another in a city with a population of over 9 million people or even a population of 8 million people, is ridiculous and unrealistic.
Conclusion
This is easily the most unmemorable film I've ever seen. Usually there is one scene, or one catch-phrase that helps differentiate a film from all the others that are produced and watched and forgotten, but this film has nothing. The worst part is that I can see myself in a couple years wandering through the video store in search of a good rental, grabbing this, watching it, and not realizing till the end when the utter insignificance of it is complete that I'd seen it before, and probably will again. There have been funnier films, there have been more touching films, there have been films that were better than this in every possible way and yet still mediocre. A Lot Like Love takes up a lot of time for a film where nothing really happens. Oliver and Emily go all kinds of places, and never do anything at all (except visit a grave that is never explained). At first it seemed like this movie could have been alright or at least better than it ended up being, but after scene after scene of dramatic breakups with other people, and Oliver and Emily successfully contacting and finding one another time after time after time, it was clear that it wasn't going anywhere. The ending is predictable, and I don't even have to tell you because you probably already know. There is no attachment to the characters, especially not Emily and her ever-changing personalities, and this film was basically lousy. I wouldn't advise renting it; it's impossible to differentiate from hundreds of other films anyway.
